Artist managers play an integral and, at times, underappreciated role in the music industry. As a brand advisor, 24/7 ally and general “get your shit together” advocate, they can take artists from pariah to Mariah. Sometimes a little emotional support and a shove out the door is all you need.

In January resident helmsman Cooper Turley shone a light on this crew, launching the Web3 Manager Launchpad, a second chapter in a series that started with last year’s Music NFT Launchpad. For this one, Turley built a month-long curriculum aimed at educating and elevating rising web3 artist managers – covering non-fungible token (NFT) fundamentals, the music NFT landscape, the collector mindset and web3 artist expectations.

Turley set the stage in an essay on artist development in web3, defining a web3 artist as someone who’s minted at least three NFTs. Three may be arbitrary, but the idea is that it’s not the one-and-done droppers. It’s those with enough buy-in to commit to some level of consistency, but who are “hitting a ceiling when doing so,” Turley adds.

He estimates there are about 500 artists who qualify, and states that “it’s tough to be an artist in web3.” Ditch the “in web3” and it’s just as true. One could argue that – considering there are more than 10 million artists on Spotify – your odds of success are much higher in this still very niche web3 space. 

But that’s not the whole story. In his article, Turley outlines an ecosystem built around finding and cultivating “collectors” – the de facto title for people who care enough to add your music NFT to their digital CD rack. These people are connected to something – your story, your sound, the accompanying visual art, maybe all of the above. Whatever the trigger, context is becoming more prevalent again, which means there are more opportunities to catalyze connection, and that’s good. The music, though, amongst all those opportunities, remains the nucleus.

“If you make great music,” Turley writes, “you should never have an issue finding people to support you.” I hope that’s true. But “great” is subjective, and the music being released in the ecosystem deserves to be examined through the lens of music journalism. To date, virtually every piece of media attention focuses on the mechanics of the release. As a music journalist, the dearth of attention given to the music itself is off-putting, and I have yet to find much great music in web3.

Still, others are finding theirs, and that is great. In the music NFT collector testimonials Turley appends to the piece, nearly everyone talks about the music itself as that ineffable link between artist and fan. So for the moment let’s set aside subjectivity and look at the blueprints of community connection in web3. 

The unique wherewithal needed to mint across various music NFT platforms – like Sound.xyz and Catalog – and then navigate token-gating, airdrops and a bevy of messaging and social platforms – from Discord to Telegram, Lenster to Twitter – can be intimidating. So, let’s add web3 savvy to the “get your shit together” toolkit of the new artist manager.

Arella Trustman

In exploring this new role, I chatted with LaTecia Johnson, whose partnerships with artists like Nas and Diplo helped define the space for the on-chain royalties platform Royal. I spoke with Arella Trustman, a budding manager who took part in the inaugural cohort of the web3 Manager Launchpad. And finally, with ladidai (pictured at the beginning of this article)– the manager of the artist TK, the Director of Social and Partnerships at the music guild, Campfire and part of the Launchpad’s curated committee of benefactors. Below are some salient quotes from our conversations.

LATECIA JOHNSON

LaTecia Johnson’s music journey started when she was two years old – her parents tell a story of her singing Janet Jackson in the backseat of their car. Music was always her thing, and she began her career as a successful songwriter. But over the past decade, she’s forged a professional identity in tech, creating strategies for household names like Apple, Microsoft and Nielsen. 

After developing the go-to-market strategy for Royal, she’s gone all in on her agency Visionary Rising, a growth partner for creators, startups and brands, where she preaches the importance of “owning your shit” – a maxim she started championing long before there were blockchain-powered tools to support the cause.

“My basis has always been around the importance of owning your audience, owning your music, owning really every aspect of your career – and then being able to choose who you want to partner with to manage that for you,” she said in the interview. 

“It's becoming clear now that that's something, but five, six years ago, someone saying, ‘hey, you need to own everything,’ was like, ‘what are you talking about? The label does it for me. The distributor does it for me. This person does it for me. Why do I as a manager need to worry about my artist owning that?’ 

“But I had a different perspective because I'd worked at Nielsen and I’d been at the negotiating table and inside that room. So that’s what has led me back to where I'm at, and now to evolving into web3 and offering those opportunities for artists.

“But I also don't think that as a whole, web3 is where it needs to be yet in order for artists to truly benefit. I think it has to be right in the middle of utilizing the impact and the tools that are provided in web2 and hone in on who are your top 10% of fans, and then build a community with them in web3 to really continue to drive that engagement.” 

ARELLA TRUSTMAN

Arella Trustman grew up as a dancer in a musical household, and though her professional focus has been clinical psychology, she’s always considered herself to be music-adjacent. When her brother got her into NFTs, her love for music gained a new light and she joined Good Karma Records, a music label decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) focused on web3 artists. 

There Trustman met the artist Daz Merchant and she subsequently became his manager. Today she also manages Brio, Toha and Noah Heim, and alongside the artist TAROT, she’s building a web3 music consultancy called Soul Tribe Solutions, which helps artists tackle the sundry challenges of onboarding to – and finding success in – web3.

“One of the big things between the legacy industry and the web3 music space is that when you're in the legacy industry as an independent artist, you really don't have a lot of opportunity, because [the chances of] being signed by a label are slim to none. 

“But with the legacy industry, getting signed to a label comes with a lot more perks than just the advance. You get the platform of being under a label, you get marketing, you get PR, you get campaigns, you get strategy, you get tour management – you get all of these little bits and pieces that round out your presence as a musician and your ability to continue to climb higher on your path to the top. 

“All of that is absent in web3, so whereas in the traditional music industry, the manager might just interface between a lot of different teams and a lot of different people to execute growth for the musician, in web3, the manager really takes on all of those roles.”

ladidai

ladidai fell in love with music as a child, watching and admiring artists like Destiny’s Child and Britney Spears. The native New Yorker grew up writing songs, and she won an award from ASCAP New York before moving out to Los Angeles to pursue songwriting. In LA, she went from studio to studio, party to party, meeting as many people as possible. When the pandemic hit, she took her networking online to Clubhouse, where she started hearing murmurs of web3.

Soon she dove down the rabbit hole, working at a web3 startup and exploring the new technology’s place in music. After seeing old friend and artist TK sell out his Eternal Garden, a collection of 700 audiovisual NFTs, she reached out. They reconnected at the NFTNYC conference, and he tried to recruit her to his team. She’d never wanted to do artist management because she’d always heard it was a thankless job, but she’d worked with TK before and she liked his music, so she agreed to join his crew to support web3 efforts and projects, like the TK-founded music guild Campfire. He had already shown he was committed to his art, and for ladi, that’s an integral part to the formula. 

“I think it's really dope when artists are also active in web2. I always say web3 is cool, but the most successful type of artists most likely will be web2.5 – leveraging both sides of things.

“So someone who knows how to utilize social media, or at least tries. Even if you're not great at social media, if you're consistent with content, at least you're making an effort to figure out how to get better. 

“Are you going to events, are you doing shows? Are you trying to meet people? Because now we're sort of in a virtual world, so regardless of where you are, even if somewhere that's not a music city, you can still find ways to build.

“So I think having initiative is really important because a lot of times, artists will come to me like, ‘I'm looking for a manager, and I'm like, ‘you're literally not even doing the basic things.’ You need to be doing everything that you can do to advance your career so that way by the time the manager comes, they have something to do. Because if I’m telling you you need to post on TikTok, or you need to be in the studio, you don't need a manager. You need to do your job.”